Being Creative The director of a series of photography workshops shares insights distilled from years of working with people who must be creative for a living. Having hired, trained, and inspired thousands of creative people, and being creative himself, he warns that creativity is not easy and neither is the creative person.

Every summer Monday, a group of photographers and filmmakers gathers in an old barrel factory on the coast of Maine. They've come for a week of workshops on such wide-ranging topics as learning to see and getting work from ad agencies. Most are from big cities and make their living being creative. From the first day, they begin a process of shedding layers of habit and years of accumulated rules to get back to the creative source that first inspired their work.

I see it happen every summer at the Maine Photographic Workshops where 200 photographers, film directors, cinematographers, actors, and writers gather in each session to work and study with masters of their craft. Some are amateurs afraid of their own shadows; others are stodgy professionals who have lost the ability to see. But all come to feel the magic of being creative.

Can we teach them creativity? No, but we can help them rediscover what it is to be creative.

There is nothing new we can teach such people, except perhaps the amateurs who need to acquire more craft. Our task is to help them unlearn the things that keep them from being creative. Our job is to tell them it's all right to let go, to be disorganized, spontaneous, and even spiritual. They rarely hear such advice from their employers.

We don't have to teach people anything new in order to help them become more creative so that they can bring more imagination to their work and more fulfillment to their lives. But we do need to help them resurrect their childlike minds, that spirit of wonder and curiosity that most of us have shut away since we were 10 years old.

On the first day of each new session, I gather all the students together and tell them it will be OK to make mistakes this week. I give them permission to fail in the hope that it will help them begin the process of shedding conformity. I share my explorations and discoveries about what it is to be creative, why the juices often dry up, and how to get them flowing again.

Who is creative? My life and work involve training artistic people, but creativity is not restricted to the arts. Creative people come from every walk of life. A creative politician is a statesman, a creative engineer is an inventor, a creative businessman is an entrepreneur, and a creative theatrical producer is an impresario. A creative accountant can be an embezzler.

Though information galore and even some wisdom about creativity are available to the diligent researcher, it is from creative people themselves--painters, musicians, photographers, writers, and actors--that I have learned the most about creativity. I've also learned about creativity from my own struggles to be a photographer, a writer, and an entrepreneur.

Lyman's list of creative traits

One thing I've learned is that creative people exhibit some distinctive traits. ] Creative people are different, and they do not mind being different. My mother would tell me as a child: "Yes, you are different, but in being different, you are special." She gave me permission to accept my "differentness"; that is the permission creative people need to give themselves. ] Creative people are playful. They do not take anything too seriously--not even serious things. ] Creative people do not play by the rules. They enjoy being outlaws, breaking rules, and thumbing their noses at conformity. They find new ways to do old things. ] Creative people are adventurous. They love to travel, to see new things, and to explore the world around them and the inner world of their minds and hearts. ] Creative people have trouble being accurate, punctual, and proper. …

It is unwise to cut film adhering to arbitrary principles, such as keeping all shots under a certain length. While Dmytryk argues that every cut must be made at a precise and perfect point, he gives no indication that these particular edit points are governed by anything other than the drive to improve what the scene intends to communicate to the audience. Some scenes require no editing at all if the composition and camera movement are strong enough to support the intent of the scene. Other scenarios, particularly action and montage sequences, require constant cuts in order to communicate the scene’s intent. If another take does not make emotional truth clearer or capture the action more appropriately than the current take, then by all means do not make a cut.

Just the most basic common sense rule there is. When cutting filmstrip, it is much easier to trim a bit of excess duration than to splice more on to increase duration. Dmytryk adds that the first instinctual decision regarding where to make a cut is usually the right one; however, you still may want to cut a little long in case you’re out of touch with your instincts. Note that this rule doesn’t so much apply to nonlinear video editing, unless for some masochistic reason you’ve disabled your undo function.

The concept here is that during movement of any kind, be it a man sitting down on a park bench or a woman darting her eyes to the left, cut in the space between the beginning and end of the action so as to mask the cut. The goal is seamless, invisible, “magical” editing. This is not possible without the greatest command of timing: timing that comes from an understanding of human perception and eye movement. If you choose to cut too early, the following cut will seem nonsensical and inappropriate. If you choose to cut too late, you may deny the audience key information and try their patience by extending the previous shot. There is a precise moment at which to make the cut: near the dead center of the action. For the man sitting down on the bench, you would most likely want to cut at the point of contact between the man and the bench. For the woman darting her eyes to the left, you may want to cut somewhere in the middle of the motion but not before or after. Mastering this fundamental of editorial timing will not only make your cuts seamless but will also strengthen the scene itself in what it intends to communicate. This, after all, is the purpose of editing: communication.

In order to maintain the invisibility of technique, a film editor strives to avoid boring, confusing, or disappointing the audience with a poorly managed cut. However, it is possible to jar the viewer from the context of the story with even the most well-intentioned cut. If your shot contains action that exits the frame, do not linger on it even for a couple frames. If you do this and fail to overlap to the next action, the viewer has no new information to feed upon and therefore lapses out of the comfort of the story. Because of only a few frames, your viewer is now examining your set design or lighting. This is exactly what should be avoided. Dmytryk suggests that if frames must be added between shots, do so at the beginning of a fresh, new shot so that the viewer accepts the lingering frames as part of exposition for a new angle or shot.

This is the concept of the director shooting scenes with heads and tails and the editor subsequently chopping them off. It is entirely unnatural to begin a scene with an actor doing nothing, preparing to act. Not only does it break the invisibility of the craft, but such an error unravels the pacing of the work causing far greater problems in the long run. A scene should begin as an actor walks into the frame or picks up a telephone or washes dishes or cleans his sword or performs some action. A scene should end with the actor walking out of frame or slamming down the telephone or breaking dishes or plunging his sword into an orc or performing some other (but not necessarily opposite) action. This serves to hasten the pace and ensure that the viewer is not bored by getting ahead of the action.

Often enough in production, the action between takes and different angles will not match with one another. Some of these culprits are beyond even the tightest control: the length of a lit cigarette, the timing of flashing city lights, the movement of arms and legs during emotionally commanding scenes. While this is no concern at all when you leave a shot alone, this lack of continuity becomes extremely problematic when you must intercut frequently between different shots. Dmytryk advises that continuity be damned. In a crisis such as this, cut to match the emotional truth of the scene so as not to cheat the audience of the experience. Even if the action doesn’t match at all, the viewer will be more inclined to follow the emotional flow of a scene than its technical shortcomings. It is likely that most continuity errors in films are not due to lazy errors on the editor’s part but instead result from decisions to use the strongest emotional performance.

More of a summary rule than anything else. At all times, Dmytryk argues, an editor must strive to improve the emotional power of a film. He felt at the time of the text’s publication that both students and teachers miss this point. Technically proficient editors created by educational institutions that fail to address the necessity of substance and value in the art of filmmaking are scarcely film editors at all.